


Homesick For The Real

by deandratb



Category: The Doctor Blake Mysteries
Genre: (that sounds ominous but literally this was requested), Alcohol, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, i don't like killing my darlings but you asked for it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-27
Updated: 2017-10-27
Packaged: 2019-01-25 04:44:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12523268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deandratb/pseuds/deandratb
Summary: Prompt fic; After losing Jean unexpectedly, Lucien faces a world without the light that kept him going. Can the rest of his family find a way to reach him?“I hope God exists. For Jean’s sake, I hope he exists, and he’s watching out for her. But I can’t wrap my mind--or my heart---around it. If he does exist, Matthew, what kind of cruel God must he be? To take her from us, from me, so soon?”





	Homesick For The Real

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimed. Anonymous prompt: **Jean dies and it's up to everyone else to make sure Lucien doesn't follow her**

He drank.

Then he drank some more.

It wasn’t as though he wanted to drown the memories, exactly--memories were all he had left now. He just wanted...everything to stop. 

He wanted to stop.

Lucien dosed himself with another round of whisky, turning the ring over in his palm. Watching it catch the weak light of the moon, he ached. It had looked so beautiful on her hand. 

And the way she'd looked at him when he finally had the chance to properly ask her...the way her eyes widened in understanding, then acceptance, and joy. Nothing glowed brighter than his Jean had in that moment, not even the diamonds she let him slip onto her finger as she tugged at his sleeve.

“Get up, Lucien,” she’d laughed, pulling him out of his traditional pose. She was wonderfully old-fashioned in some ways; he had wanted to give her the memory of him down on one knee--but she was also full of surprises.

She had never stopped surprising him. And their lives truly began that day, with his knee in the dust while she leaned down to kiss him, contagious happiness passing from her mouth to his.

Lucien closed his palm over her ring, disappearing it from view. He clenched his fist until he could feel it digging into his skin...until the pain was a focal point, and the memory faded back into the recesses of his mind.

“Lucien.”

He looked up, recognizing Matthew’s outline in his office doorway. 

“Yes?” His voice was a rasp, ravaged by alcohol and tears.

“Want a light?”

“No need for it. Come in, Matthew.”

Matthew harrumphed. “If I’m joining you, I’m turning a light on.”

“Fine. It doesn’t matter.” 

Lawson ambled in, turning on the light and taking the glass away long enough to refill it, then sip the contents himself.

“She was the best of us,” he said, saluting Lucien with the whisky.

“Yes. Yes, she was.” He relaxed his hand, dropping Jean’s ring into his desk drawer. The imprint it left on his skin caught his eye, and he ran a finger along the edges of it. A starburst. 

Jean had been his light for so long, everything was darkness without her. And none of them, well-meaning as they were, could understand. They hadn’t seen what he had seen; they hadn’t loved as he’d loved. One soothed the other--until it didn’t.

“Five years,” he muttered, pulling Lawson’s gaze up from his shoes. 

“What?”

“Five years, Matthew. That’s all we got. Five years of wedded bliss, after so many of struggle and complications.”

“Yeah.” His friend nodded. He had already decided--with a nudge from Alice, who wore her concern on the sleeve of her lab coat--that the best way he could help was just to listen. What was there to say, anyhow? Empty platitudes would do Lucien no good.

“Do you remember Xavier McBride?”

If the left-field question startled him, he didn’t show it. “’Course I do. The priest that helped cover up Clive Cooper’s murder.” It might have been a decade past, but the death of one of his own wasn’t something he’d easily forget.

Lucien nodded. “He and I had a chat, during that whole mess, and he asked me if I believed in God.”

“What did you say?”

“That I had, once. That after everything, I was no longer sure.” He aimed his bloodshot eyes at Lawson. “I still don’t know.”

“That’s understandable.”

“I hope God exists. For Jean’s sake, I hope he exists, and he’s watching out for her. But I can’t wrap my mind--or my heart---around it. If he does exist, Matthew, what kind of cruel God must he be? To take her from us, from me, so soon?”

He shook his head, taking the glass back and emptying the last of the alcohol into it. “I don’t want to do this without her.”

Despite his alarm, Matthew kept his expression calm and sympathetic. “I know.”

“Do you?” His face contorted into tears again, and he lacked the pride or self-possession to be embarrassed. “She was everything, Matthew. She was the world.”

It felt like knives in his gut, seeing her laid out on that gurney. So pale...so quiet. Jean had always had a teasing word for him; she was so full of life. It didn’t make any sense.

“You were lucky,” Lawson said quietly, pulling him back. 

“What?” 

“To have had those five years, and the time with her before that. Not everyone finds what the two of you did, Lucien.”

Even in the depths of his despair, he could see a regret Matthew had never spoken of before. He didn’t know what to do with the revelation, not now. 

“You were lucky,” Matthew repeated. “Never forget that.”

“Right.” Lucky. To have such happiness and then be stripped bare, leaving...nothing. 

He set down the glass, which was finally, truly empty. Staring at it, glimmering on the desk, was easier than looking his friend in the eye. 

“Right then,” he said quietly, standing up. “I’ll be back shortly, Matthew.”

He needed to find more whisky.

**Author's Note:**

> Story title borrowed from "Hotter Than Hell" by Dua Lipa. Chapter title borrowed from "No Light, No Light" by Florence and the Machine.


End file.
